[Bloat] Motivating commercial entities? tell the sales manager (was: ping loss "considered harmful")

[Dave Taht]

On Tue, Mar 3, 2015 at 11:46 AM, David Collier-Brown <davec-b at rogers.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 2, 2015 at 12:48 PM, Bill Ver Steeg (versteb) <versteb at cisco.com
> wrote:
>
> There are several efforts underway within this particular big vendor to
> address bloat. Are these efforts crash programs to get code out the door as
> fast as humanly possible? No. There are efforts underway, though. These
> things take time?? To be frank, the best way to drive feature
> development/deployment/adoption in most big companies is to have customers
> ask for them.
>
>
> Dave Taht <dave.taht at gmail.com> replied
>
> Creating understanding and demand has been my nearly f/t project for
> several years now. I hope it is finally starting to work!
>
> However, along the way - in trying to work with everybody in all parts of
> the industry, and to "get along" - I found myself in a deep moral and
> mental hole where I realized I was no longer being true to myself or being
> effective in what I had really set out to do by attempting to create this
> open, shared project, where I had hoped we all would be working together
> for a common goal.
>
>
> Just a rather specific pointer: it's neither the technical staff nor the
> support team that has the power to report and escalate a bug. It's the sales
> team.  If you can elevator-pitch the head of sales for Honeywell* with
> something that will avoid costing him sales, you'll get an informed and
> motivated response from the business.

I do fully understand that. However, in life, I have generally found
that talking to engineers first about deeply difficult to describe
technical problems and their potential solutions, is a way to get
started.

After that, 9 months to 2 years later, a mutated version of the same
idea ends up coming from the marketing department, usually with some
crazy crash engineering program suggested to get it implemented. It
generally requires one vendor to have finally got it, and to be
marketing their new idea or fixes, in order for the rest of the
lemmings in the herd in sales and marketing at zillions of companies,
to make it a priority.

This is sort of what just happened with streamboost, every new top-end
router I have looked at in the last few months features "Now! with
traffic shaping!" prominently on the box, with each maker creating
their own brand for it - kicked off first by the "streamboost gaming
router!" and now, "Netgear, with Dynamic QoS", "Asus, now with
Adaptive QoS!", etc.

The fact that none of the now commercial, actively sold QoS/AQM/FQ
system solutions I have tested so far actually work worth a damn, is
of course, nowhere near as important to the company and marketing
department as having a whizzy gui, and that blurb on the box, and the
actual marketing to the target market(s) (gamers mostly, so far, which
is sad, as small business *really needs this stuff* especially on
cable) in play.

We suck here at creating good, repeatable, postitive memes - with
stuff like "netperf-wrapper", "sqm-scripts", "fq_codel", and even
things like "AQM" or "Flow Queueing", that I have been considering
engaging a marketing org to somehow find some set of useful phrases to
use, with more positive connotations that "bufferbloat". Over the last
2 years, inbound web hits on the bufferbloat.net web site - despite
all the SEO we have sort of done with the mailing list and elsewhere -
has stayed constant at about 55,000 inbound links, according to
google.

And I do wish we had more stuff to correctly pitch at the sales
department. But that's not my skillset, at all. I am in many ways, a
lousy frontman for the bufferbloat movement, especially with being so
deaf (which makes me anti-social) and partially blind (which is not
helping) - and I keep wishing a - for example - Peter Diamadis or Elon
Musk or Jim Zemlin would show up and help on our behalfs, helping get
the right solutions "out there". I really admire in particular,
peter's work in making the xprize concept (and ultimately the whole
space program) take off.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Diamandis

I tried, at least, with "make-wifi-fast", and "cake" to get names that
worked better.



> If you talk to anyone else, they'll need permission from their director to
> even report a bug, and an explicit blessing from a VP to escalate it.
>
> The same is true of most large companies, even if they're not very old.  If
> they're market-driven, it the sales and marketing folks who report what the
> market wants.  Techies and CSRs will only be asked after the "market"
> speaks.
>
> --dave
> [* Honeywell no longer makes computers, so I can use them as a bad example
> (;-)]
>
> --
> David Collier-Brown,         | Always do right. This will gratify
> System Programmer and Author | some people and astonish the rest
> davecb at spamcop.net           |                      -- Mark Twain
>
>
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>



-- 
Dave Täht
Let's make wifi fast, less jittery and reliable again!

https://plus.google.com/u/0/107942175615993706558/posts/TVX3o84jjmb